“These cod factories”

In 1900, at the Colonial Diorama Pavilion at the Universal Exposition in Paris, Gaston Roullet exhibited a state-sponsored panorama of drying codfish, set on a small island off the southeastern shore of Newfoundland. As this essay explores, the painting promoted France’s colonial claim to this valuable land that was a critical base for the fishing and exportation of North Atlantic codfish. The seemingly limitless abundance of codfish in North Atlantic waters was a food commons decimated over the course of the modern era. Visual representations of the exploitation of fish stocks and the sale of fish participated in the extractive logic of a relentless global effort to empty the oceans.